There is no sense of normalcy in the world for me when a committed old communist and a reality TV star are the leading contenders in America’s upcoming presidential election. My round-up addresses some of the craziness, as well as lots of other stuff.

Debunking Ted Cruz myths. Like me, my friend Trevor Loudon supports Ted Cruz, seeing him as the candidate who is most deeply invested in returning American government to its constitutional framework. He’s therefore posted at his site a detailed article debunking many of the most ugly myths and insults hurled at Ted Cruz. Whether or not you support Cruz, you might find the post illuminating. And no, Ted Cruz didn’t steal Iowa, isn’t in league with McConnell, isn’t a globalist, and doesn’t make his employees hate him.

Thomas Sowell endorses Ted Cruz. Thomas Sowell is one of the greatest living economists and intelligent thinkers. The fact that he endorses Ted Cruz — an endorsement given extra urgency with Justice Scalia’s death — should mean a great deal.

The trouble with Trump. The South Carolina debate is long gone, and the primary is tomorrow, but if you have a minute, read Ace’s analysis of Trump’s attack on George W. Bush during the S.C. debate. Ace offers an important analysis of the trouble with Trump, and it’s the fact that his ego leaves no room for anyone else’s.

On Trump and political blogging. Neo-Neocon has written a really superb piece about the nature of political blogging when you’re a blogger like me: you’ve been around for a long time, you have a wonderful crew of dedicated readers, you can’t get traction with a larger audience, and your thought process is just plodding enough when you think about a story that you miss the news cycle and the caravan has already moved on when you finally publish an important insight or factual data point. (Neo-Neocon is a much better writer and thinker than I, so her story is sadder than mine. She should have so much more traction than she does.) Anyway, Neo-Neocon shares her insights into Trump’s hollering that “Bush lied and people died” — insights that are unlike any others out there, and that are also a whole lot better and more informative than you got from the first 24-hour news cycle.

Trump thinks he’s Bernie Sanders. Trump went to MSNBC to have his ego massaged . . . I mean, to sell himself to the 360 Progressives who still watch that channel, and amused his small audience when he confused himself with Bernie Sanders. Really. Meanwhile, Cruz, Rubio, and Carson offered thoughtful political commentary at C-SPAN.

Another day, another incredible collection of articles I think you’ll like, all of which I’ve tried to present in a way that’s both interesting and brief.

Yet another government lie. Is everything we think we know about the cost of living data false? And worse, is the actual cost of living increase we’re facing in the double digits in many cities? The Chapman Index says we’re the victims of a sustained lie hiding how much less our money buys. In other words, inflation is much worse than you realize.

Rank and file Marines horrified by Obama orders. Actual Marines, not people who just pretend to be military experts for the sake of advancing the Obama administrations social re-engineering goals, are appalled by the demand that the Marines feminize everything, including the word “rifleman.” Incidentally, I found this link on the Facebook feed of a young Marine friend who raised in Progressive Marin. He noted that nothing can re-engineer the fact that, at a basic biological level, women aren’t as strong as men — and no amount of gender illusions will change that reality.

Conservative voters like Cruz. GOP establishment figures have always hated Ted Cruz, which I think is because he’s made them look like what they are — liars who told the voters one thing and then voted with Obama on just about everything. Now that the Republican primary is narrowing, the principle that “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” appears to be coming into play, and the GOP is starting to line up behind Trump (who has, like the GOP itself, a distinguished RINO record on many issues). It’s worth remembering, therefore, that ordinary people — voters, not players — like Cruz.

Thomas Sowell on elections. Elections aren’t about revenge or anger or “making a statement.” Instead, as Sowell says, “They are held to choose who shall hold in their hands the fate of hundreds of millions of Americans today and of generations yet unborn.” My brain is always a better and smarter place after reading Thomas Sowell. I wish more Americans, especially young Americans, would read him. Sadly, it turns out that, thanks to 50 years of Leftist control over education, too many of America’s so-called best and brightest are a terribly ignorant group of people who know nothing about America’s history, constitution, or political structure. (H/T Sadie)

I was driving along in the car and, suddenly, the phrase “Roe v. Wade” popped into my head. In 1973, the Supreme Court waded into what should have been a state-by-state legislative matter, and created the most vicious 39 year fight in America since the Civil War. One side found the decision completely invalid, while the other side became so invested in its validity that it almost became a one-issue party — and, moreover, a one-issue party that became ever more extreme in its defense of its victory. By parsing the decision as he did, Justice Roberts prevented another American civil war.

When I returned home and turned on my computer, I discovered that Charles Krauthammer was thinking along the same lines. If I’m in sync with Krauthammer, I’m clearly in good company.

Krauthammer’s view is that Roberts wears two hats. The first hat is the constitutional conservative, which kicked in to prevent him from allowing a vast expansion of the Commerce Clause. The second hat is as the Supreme Court’s custodian. That second hat requires Roberts to protect a Court that’s been under a shadow since the decisions in Roe v. Wade (favoring the Dems) and Bush v. Gore (favor the Republicans). So, after wearing his conservative hat to deal with the Commerce Clause, Roberts still had some work left to do:

That’s Roberts, philosophical conservative. But he lives in uneasy coexistence with Roberts, custodian of the Court, acutely aware that the judiciary’s arrogation of power has eroded the esteem in which it was once held. Most of this arrogation occurred under the liberal Warren and Burger Courts, most egregiously with Roe v. Wade, which willfully struck down the duly passed abortion laws of 46 states. The result has been four decades of popular protest and resistance to an act of judicial arrogance that, as Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg once said, “deferred stable settlement of the issue” by the normal electoral/legislative process.

More recently, however, few decisions have occasioned more bitterness and rancor than Bush v. Gore, a 5–4 decision split along ideological lines. It was seen by many (principally, of course, on the left) as a political act disguised as jurisprudence and designed to alter the course of the single most consequential political act of a democracy — the election of a president.

Whatever one thinks of the substance of Bush v. Gore, it did affect the reputation of the Court. Roberts seems determined that there be no recurrence with Obamacare. Hence his straining in his Obamacare ruling to avoid a similar result — a 5–4 decision split along ideological lines that might be perceived as partisan and political.

National health care has been a liberal dream for a hundred years. It is clearly the most significant piece of social legislation in decades. Roberts’s concern was that the Court do everything it could to avoid being seen, rightly or wrongly, as high-handedly overturning sweeping legislation passed by both houses of Congress and signed by the president.

I think Krauthammer’s analysis is correct. Roberts didn’t rule as he did because of his seizure medicine or because he was blackmailed. He ruled this way because, perhaps rightly, he was keeping a legislative problem in the legislative sphere. The American voters, by putting Democrats into Congress and the White House, broke the American system. They now own that broken system and it’s up to them to fix it. In this case, if the voters are smart enough, they’ll elect Republicans by a large majority. If they’re not smart enough, we’re in for a lot more breakage.

Viewed this way, Roberts did the right thing. He protected the Supreme Court’s integrity and he made the American people responsible for their own stupidity.

The best bet for the coming months is that Obama’s base will go home happy, and that he will not be able to rally them for the election. They’ll be like the person who ate too much at dinner and sits there in a stupor, even as the roof falls on his head. Unfortunately for Obama, Romney will be able to rally his base. If you thought 2010 was the year of the Tea Party, wait until you see the summer of 2012. Like 2012, Tea Partiers are up in arms; and unlike (and better than) 2012, this time they’re already organized with mailing lists, data bases, and vast amounts of political and protest experience.

Even better, after Americans suffered through months of the drug-addled, filthy, violent Occupy movement, the media is going to find it impossible to paint clean, polite, educated, employed Tea Partiers as crazed radicals. This summer, the Tea Party will have traction, especially because the Supreme Court, in ruling in Obama’s favor, put a name on Obama’s conduct: taxes on the middle class.

That’s all good. What’s bad is that, as I noted in my original post on the subject, the Supreme Court has managed to allow taxes to have the scope of the Commerce Clause: From this day forward, Congress can not only tax activity, it can also tax inactivity. Long after Obama is gone from office, that legacy will remain. The only saving grace is that taxes require simple majorities. Easy come, easy go, one might say — except that taxes never go away easy, do they?

Andrew Breitbart is a dynamo. He’s also a happy warrior, as you can see during his 16 minute speech at CPAC. In addition to his promise that he has videos of Obama during those missing college years, Breitbart does something more important — he frames the upcoming election properly. It’s not about the candidates, it’s about the opposition. We are at war, not just with Islamists, but with the radical Left at home, a Left that lives in our media, our schools, and on our streets. Breitbart understands this:

(1) Oppose Obama, Not America: The absolute wrong way to react to life in the minority is … well, what we saw from too many people on the Left the past 8 years: calling everyone from the President on down to individual soldiers and Marines war criminals, parroting the propaganda of our enemies, exposing classified national security secrets on the front pages of the newspapers, and generally doing whatever possible to stymie the national defense and convince the nation and the world that America is the bad guy. We’re better than that. When Obama fails to act to defend America and its interests and allies, or violates the basiccommon-senseprinciples of national security and foreign policy, we will of course be unsparing in our criticism. But we should not emulate the Left; indeed, the day may even come when Obama needs defending from the Left for doing what needs to be done, and we certainly want to encourage him to take actions that provoke that reaction.

(2) No Chicken-Hawking: This is a corollary of #1: given his shaky draft history, Bill Clinton at times appeared afraid of criticism over deploying the military on grounds that he didn’t serve. We should never make Obama feel that he should blanch at defending the nation simply because he never wore the uniform (fortunately, on that score, Obama’s defining personality trait is hubris). We’ve had civilian leadership before, we’ll have it again.

(3) Don’t Question The Verdict: Was there voter fraud in yesterday’s election? Were there other shenanigans both legal and illegal? I’m sure there were, and others who follow those stories will no doubt be expanding on them in the weeks to come. Chronicling specific instances of misconduct is an important service – to expose the miscreants and their connections to the Obama campaign, to punish and deter and provide a basis for someday preventing a recurrence (although don’t expect the Obama era to see anything but massive resistance to taking even the most tepid steps against voter fraud). And likewise, of course, there is still plenty more to be examined in Obama’s fundraising, to say nothing of the untruths he told to get elected and the really shameful behavior of the media.

But fundamentally, he got more votes where it mattered and he won the race. Supporters of Gore and Kerry who refused to accept those realities in 2000 and 2004 ended up doing a lot of lasting damage to public confidence in our electoral system. The step of challenging the results of an election is a grave one not to be taken without serious evidence. Let’s not repeat their mistakes with conspiracy theories.

I’m getting emails from committed conservatives who are unhappy right now, feeling that the air has gone out of the election balloon. I’m looking at things a different way.

The ACORN registration fraud has inflated the numbers of registered Democrats. Given that some people registered as Dems 72 times, there is no way that ACORN can get 72 fraudulent voters to the booths. And that’s just one person. This means that the huge threat they hold over us — that is, the threat of swollen Dem voter rolls — actually isn’t as big a threat as we thought, and that’s true despite inevitable fraud at the voting booth.

One of the volunteer “get out the voters” in Marin sent out an email with an interesting heading: “John McCain and Sarah Palin will win California . . . if every McCain/Palin supporter actually votes.” I wrote to her to ask if that was really true,or just blind optimism. Here’s what she wrote back (just yesterday):

I was, I think, a little creative in saying that we will win California if… BUT I believe that it’s true. There are so many Obama supporters in Marin and other Democratic strongholds that, by and large, I believe that because they feel less threatened they therefore feel less urgency to vote. Such a small number of people actually vote, you know.

I am absolutely certain that if every Republican who moans about the possibility of an Obama presidency actually votes AND gets other McCain supporters to cast their votes, we would take this state. It’s not about who loves you, baby, it’s about who’s actually going to make the time to vote for you.

This gal is right. If Dems are not going to get out as many voters as they’ve pretended they have, and if we can get out all the voters we really have, we can make a difference.

Also, just as they’re trying to depress our vote with all this “landslide” talk, they may also depress their own. After all, for busy, scattered, chaotic people (and there are those on both sides of the political aisle), voting can be a pain. If you’re sure that you’re candidate is going to win by a landslide regardless, isn’t that an invitation for you to stay home. After all, how much can your vote matter? We, on the other hand, know our votes matter, and we’re going to get out there and do something.

I don’t think Glenn Reynolds will mind my reprinting this in its entirety, since it deserves to be read as widely as possible. Send it along to your friends — and, maybe, to your local newsroom:

A READER AT A MAJOR NEWSROOM EMAILS: “Off the record, every suspicion you have about MSM being in the tank for O is true. We have a team of 4 people going thru dumpsters in Alaska and 4 in arizona. Not a single one looking into Acorn, Ayers or Freddiemae. Editor refuses to publish anything that would jeopardize election for O, and betting you dollars to donuts same is true at NYT, others. People cheer when CNN or NBC run another Palin-mocking but raising any reasonable inquiry into obama is derided or flat out ignored. The fix is in, and its working.” I asked permission to reprint without attribution and it was granted.

UPDATE: The Anchoress hears similar things. And reader Eric Schubert: “The Edwards debacle was proof enough of where the heart of the MSM lies, and lack of curiousity of the press about Edwards probably cost Hillary the nomination. And that shameful episode offers a warning to the MSM. What if Obama does have a skeleton in his closet (such as a shady deal or outright bribe) that is revealed after he wins the election? While the chance of this scenario is remote, imagine the backlash against the MSM if it could be shown that a reasonable investigation by the MSM would have easily revealed this secret to the public prior to the election?”